We had a birthday dinner the other night (Max, 15), and we sat outside the restaurant on the patio. Because it was quieter than inside, I could actually hear the modern pop music being played over the PA system. I couldn’t differentiate between one song and the next–and it turns out, that’s kind of the point.
I did some research and learned that, as with almost everything else in life these days, the main reason pop music has taken a turn for the boring, flat, and predictable is technology. Largely the internet, but other tech “innovations” play into it as well.
What’s bad about it? A study by the Spanish National Research Council, analyzing popular music from 1955 (conveniently, the year I was born, so a good benchmark for me) to 2010 came up with three main reasons. You can watch a video about it if you care to.
First, timbral diversity has dropped consistently since the 1960s. Here’s a good discussion of timbre in music, and why it’s important. In brief, per Wikipedia: “In music, timbre also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Mostly what you’re hearing in pop music today is a keyboard, a drum machine, and some tech stuff–maybe a sampler, maybe an autotuned voice or voices. Computer software is putting it all together, not a professional at a mixing board.
Second, there’s been a loss of harmonic complexity over that span of time. An academic paper explains basically what that is: “We propose three measures for the complexity of harmony: (i) the complexity based on usage of the basic tonal functions and parallels in the harmonic progression, (ii) the entropies of unigrams and bigrams in the sequence of chords, and (iii) the regularity of the harmonic progression.” A lot of modern pop songs use the same sequence of notes, leading to music that all sounds depressingly similar.
Finally, the dynamic range of pop music has become extremely limited. According to QSC Live Sound, “Every genre of music is associated with a certain dynamic range, meaning the difference between the loudest and softest passages. The word ‘dynamic’ is defined as ‘a force that stimulates change or progress within a system of process.’ It defines how versatile a piece of music or a piece of gear behaves (musical instrument, amplifier, effects pedal, effects processor, etc.). The opposite of this is ‘static,’ defined by ‘lacking in movement, action or change.’” Contemporary pop recordings are compressed to make the quietest parts as loud as the loudest parts, eliminating the range. Again, compression is a tech thing.
But the biggest reason for all these changes is, of course, money, and how it’s made in the music biz these days. Album sales are no longer the biggest driver of musical success. Instead, songs are bought individually, often as a result of some aggregator like Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music saying, “If you like X, then you’ll like Y.” Because there’s a lot of money to be made here, record companies and performers see X selling well, so they want their Y to sound a lot like X did.
These sites have enormous libraries of songs, so the record companies want to grab listeners’ attention in a hurry, and hold it. The way to do that, in pop music, is through hooks, so many of the popular songs are almost all hook, repeated over and over.
Napster and the easy online availability of many, many songs have cut into the profits of the record companies, so those companies have been cutting overhead. And because many of their acts are “discovered” online, via YouTube or TikTok or whatever, one of the major cuts has been to A&R staff. A&R (artist & repertoire) folks are the ones who used to go out to the Troubador in West Hollywood and the Night Owl Cafe in Greenwich Village and similar spots all over the country, listening to hundreds of performers in hopes of finding the next great one. And they often did. But they’re not doing that anymore–instead, what staff remains is sitting in their offices scanning the internet to find musicians who sound like those other musicians.
I’m not saying that all modern music is horrible. We still have some performers who can sing–Adele, Taylor Swift, umm…I’m sure there are more. But in the last century you could turn on pop radio and hear Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Burton Cummings, Cher, Elvis, Harry Nilsson, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Al Greene, Tony Bennett, Marvin Gaye…all world-class singers, each with his or her own unique style, each instantly identifiable from the first notes. You could hear guitarists like Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Etta Baker, Jimmy Page, Lita Ford… the list goes on and on.
And I’m not saying that there isn’t some good music still being made. I’m just saying it requires some searching to find it. Rock isn’t dead, it’s just hiding behind a lot of terrible, bland pop music.
#Tags: music, rock and roll, rock music
